Goldwater dropped out of college and began working in his family’s Phoenix department store, Goldwater’s, of which he was president from 1937 to 1953. He was elected to the Phoenix city council in 1949, and in 1952 he narrowly won election to the U.S. Senate. He was reelected in 1958 by a large majority. A conservative Republican, he called for a harsher diplomatic stance toward the Soviet Union, opposed arms-control negotiations with that country, and charged the Democrats with creating a quasi-socialist state at home.

Barry Goldwater.The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and MuseumAfter winning several key victories in the 1964 primary elections, Goldwater won the Republican presidential nomination on the first ballot. He fought a determined campaign against the incumbent president, Lyndon B. Johnson, but national prosperity worked in Johnson’s favour, and Goldwater was handicapped by the charge that he was an extreme anticommunist who might carry the country into war with the Soviet Union. Goldwater and his vice-presidential running mate, William E. Miller, were decisively defeated in the election (November 3); they carried only Arizona and five states in the Deep South.

In 1968 Goldwater was reelected to the Senate and was reelected thereafter until he retired in 1987. He led the delegation of senior Republican politicians who on Aug. 7, 1974, persuaded President Richard M. Nixon to resign from office. Goldwater moderated many of his views in later years and became a symbol of high-minded conservative Republicanism. His published works include The Conscience of a Conservative (1960), The Coming Breakpoint (1976), and With No Apologies (1979).